Design tells stories that touch people’s minds and bodies. Storytelling helps designers reach people in emotionally fulfilling ways. Designers in today's cross-disciplinary, multimedia world create objects, images and brands that activate all the senses. Designers can employ ideas about narrative, behaviour, perception and humour to amaze, delight and orient the eye and mind. How do vision and language interact with taste and smell? How does a song taste? How can designers engage the senses to create richer and more inclusive experiences? Ellen shares ideas and inspiration from her two latest projects, Design Is Storytelling and The Senses: Design Beyond Vision.

Writer, Curator and Graphic Designer.
Ellen is the Director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. As Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office, Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture, and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design. Her book Thinking with Type is used by students, designers and educators worldwide. D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself, co-authored with her graduate students at MICA, explains design processes to a general audience. Her other books include Graphic Design: The New Basics (with Jennifer Cole Phillips) and Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book. She is co-author with Abbott Miller of several books, including The Bathroom, the Kitchen and the Aesthetics of Waste, Design Writing Research and Swarm. Ellen is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honours given to a graphic designer or design educator in the US.